I wrote briefly about my ACLA seminar on periodization yesterday over at my course blog (part of my campaign to make it clearer to students what it is that I do all day). Today's papers by Claire Bowen, Colin Gillis, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, and Angela Naimou were excellent. Claire's paper in particular responded to some of the points raised in yesterday's session, particularly the papers by Jordan Zweck and myself, and was therefore of great interest to me. Claire provocatively asked why the term "generation" becomes pervasive in the twentieth century, pointing to patterns in that terminology and the tendency of poets of the twentieth century to begin to appropriate the voice of a generation. As with yesterday's session, we were sorry to end the discussion.

Let me go on record with my belief that this seminar format works very well.